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Chicago Area College Fighting Over Adopting Student’s Bill of Rights

In the midst of the Obama coronation in Washington this week, school board member Sheila Patterson of the Jackson Public School System in Jackson, Michigan told teachers in her district that if they don’t show Barack Obama’s inauguration in the class room they should just “go home.” Patterson further told teachers that if they didn’t show the ceremony they “don’t belong in this school district.” Patterson also tsked such teachers sternly alerting them that she was “very, very disappointed.”

The news report of this incident notes that 43 percent of the school district is comprised of minorities. I suppose that means that the 57 percent that isn’t minority either does not deserve to have their opinions known, or is presumed not to have wanted to see the ceremony. Either way, we have what shapes up to be a school board member throwing the race card at what she is trying to paint as racist teachers.

It was later discovered that many teachers wanted to show the ceremony on their class computers, but the Internet of the District was overloaded and many couldn’t get a connection. No word if Sheila Patterson will apologize for her racist outburst and her assumptions that whites hate Barack Obama and didn’t want to celebrate his big day.

I recount the incident above to warm up to the topic of a student academic bill of rights. Granted the incident above occurred in a local institute of elementary education and the argument over instituting such a document to protect student’s freedom from political harassment is centered on colleges and universities, but the principle of educators forcing their political agendas on students unawares is the same.

As this academic year has progressed a fight has developed between the board of trustees of a DuPage County, Illinois community college, the College of DuPage, and its faculty association. DuPage County is the county just to the west of Chicago’s Cook County.

At issue is the board’s decision to include in new rules for the college language reminiscent of education firebrand David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR). Sara Dogan of FrontPageMagazine.com has the story.

In what may be a landmark battle currently playing out at a large Midwestern community college, the College of DuPage’s faculty association has pitted itself against the board of trustees over whether to protect the academic freedom of its students. This latest skirmish in the five-year war over David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR) reveals the lengths to which faculty unions are prepared to go to deny college students the right to an education free from indoctrination.

It should be noted that DuPage County is a bastion of conservatism in the blue, blue state of Illinois. So it is no surprise that the board members there might be the ones to push such an idea. Especially since these same board members have found anecdotal evidence that some students have had grades slashed or been ridiculed by professors and teachers over student’s displays of conservative ideals in papers and class rooms.

Naturally, the National Education Association (NEA) is one of the chief detractors of this protection of student’s rights.

In an 11-page letter to the Board of Trustees addressing the Academic Bill of Rights and other proposed policy changes, the NEA chapter claims that the Bill has “political connotations.” The letter goes on to state, “ABOR supporters apparently hope that the bill will give elected officials the power to dictate, for example, whether creationism should be taught alongside evolution in college biology…. it is the responsibility of college professors, who are trained experts in their fields, to evaluate that evidence. It’s not the job of politicians.”

This hypocritical claim that only the board members are interested in pushing a political message on students and not teachers and school administrators is typical of the NEA, itself a politically driven organization. Dogan points out that the proposed rules make no mention at all of any role to be taken by political figures making the NEA’s concerns a non sequitur.

While incidents abound from all corners of the country of educators and school administrators forcing students to toe the leftist political line, while curriculum after class is loaded with extreme left opinion and content, for professors and teachers unions to deny the truth is simply a laughable proposition.

Our fetid universities are becoming the laughing stock of the world with standards falling more every year, classroom content being warped by indoctrination instead of built upon scholarship, and an ever widening destruction of simple free speech. It is quickly coming to a point where a diploma from most US colleges and universities aren’t worth the paper they’ve been printed upon. Yet tuition costs to obtain these worthless slips of paper are skyrocketing.

But, the board of trustees of the College of DuPage deserve our support for their courageous actions. We need to get our schools back to teaching useful subjects — as opposed to the foolishness of “Womyns Studies” and the like. More specifically, we need to cleanse our schools of the extremists of the left that have no other goal but to tear down this country and fill the minds of its youth with hate for their own nation.